Bringing The Mountain Hawk Aboard Part Of President Farrington's Agenda

March 07, 1999|by PAUL REINHARD, The Morning Call

Gregory C. Farrington came to Bethlehem with some pretty lofty goals aimed at placing Lehigh University among the top 25 universities in the country.

In his Founder's Day address, the new president talked about things like hiring the best faculty and staff and paying them "fairly and competitively," responsibility and accountability for academic leaders, the need for a strategic plan to "ensure the academic and financial success of the university," strengthening Lehigh as a community and a number of broad development goals.

That academic agenda can keep Farrington plenty busy. Maybe that's why it seemed almost frivolous that he should be sitting around talking about whether Lehigh sports teams should be referred to as Engineers, Mountain Hawks, Brown & White or some combination of the three.

One segment of Lehigh supporters can't understand why the university would want to mess with tradition, even in something so seemingly trivial as a nickname. Farrington can't go anywhere without running into someone who wants to bend his ear or solicit his support in what seems to be a no-win situation.

We've all heard by now that the nickname Engineers wasn't adopted initially because of the reputation of Lehigh's engineering school, but that it really had more to do with Asa Packer and railroads.

Maybe because Lehigh did a bad job of marketing the railroading theme, and maybe because people made false assumptions, the meaning of the nickname became blurred. Some recruiters will tell you that the university's image suffers because prospective students think of Lehigh only as an engineering school.

Things got even stickier in November, 1995 when Lehigh introduced a mascot it calls a Mountain Hawk. The university never said officially that Mountain Hawks was to replace Engineers as the Lehigh nickname, but its use was never discouraged, either.

In other words, indecisive people invited controversy -- and they got it.

Enter Farrington, admittedly not the biggest sports fan -- and a former dean in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, no less.

At Clarkson University, where Farrington did his undergraduate study, he knew only ice hockey. At Penn, he saw only basketball games.

He admits to know virtually nothing about football -- except that the ball has a funny shape. But with Athletic Director Joe Sterrett as his tutor, and the Lehigh football team knocking off one opponent after another in 1998, Farrington found himself fascinated.

Farrington, at the urging of Head Coach Greg Strobel, also has been indoctrinated into college wrestling, which may present even more problems than football when it comes to understanding.

It wasn't long before be was introduced to the Mountain Hawk.

"I like the way that crazy bird interacts with kids," Farrington said during a recent interview in his campus office.

"They pull his tail, tap his beak. Even I have tapped his beak," he added, using that as a cue to pull out a 5x7 photograph of him sharing a Kodak moment with the Mountain Hawk. "Honestly, I didn't put that here just for your benefit."

But the Mountain Hawk hasn't had all his attention. Farrington has made numerous get-acquainted appearances, and he has encountered Lehigh alumni who "express themselves with passion" about the university's traditional nickname.

So, put the new president on a fence with a bunch of those passionate alumni on one side and a school full of 21st-century graduates on the other and watch him straddle it.

"College is an important four years, an intense time, and some people want to freeze that period," Farrington said. "They go on changing, but they'd like to think their college is the way it always was.

"I've said to graduates, `If you want to remember them as Engineers, that's fine. You are under no obligation to change.' But the students I represent are important to me, and if this (Mountain Hawk) connects with them, fine. And if our athletic teams choose to be Mountain Hawks, the newspaper ought to reflect that out of respect for the students."

According to Farrington, a representative of the women's lacrosse team recently asked his permission to design a Mountain Hawk emblem for its uniforms -- something of which even Sterrett had no knowledge.

And while Farrington and his wife, Jean, were having dinner recently at Delta Tau Delta fraternity, he conducted an unscientific poll and came up with more Mountain Hawk support.

That's the president's on-campus view.

Farrington admitted he also had received a fair number of letters and e-mail messages from people who want nothing to do with what some of them have derisively called "that chicken hawk."

"Some alumni want me to demand that our sports teams be Engineers, but I can't do that," Farrington said.

When asked whether that meant the alumni were in second place behind the students, he quickly said, "No, they all come first. It's just that the people I am directly involved with are the students."